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In this issue:

A Message from the President, Bonnie TuSmith

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Dr. Katharine Rodier
Assistant Professor of English
Marshall University
400 Hal Greer Blvd.
Huntington WV 25755-2646
rodier@marshall.edu
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A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT, BONNIE TU SMITH
October 17, 2001

In a recent Boston Globe editorial entitled “Treating the Roots of Terrorism” (Sept. 29, 2001), Jonathan Moore writes, “Much of the world population lives in deprivation and helplessness, without adequate food, shelter or education." The sobering fact that “More than one billion people live on $1 a year” should serve as a wake-up call for even the most oblivious of Americans. Given that we are one human race, anyone with a social conscience should take this deplorable situation personally. Those of us who are privileged enough to have more than adequate food, shelter, and education bear the responsibility of utilizing such privilege to help alleviate human suffering. In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks against “Americans,” the lurking fear and paralysis that now accompany our daily routines already seem a new way of life. So how do we go about business as usual at this moment in history?

This quarter, I am teaching a course on Toni Morrison and another on multiethnic literatures of the U. S.  The students seem more subdued and less resistant than usual.  In the novel we started this week, Beloved, the recalled atrocities and accompanying pain are palpable.  Humans were, and are, capable of unfathomable cruelty—perhaps due to our ability to dissociate from “the other.”  The novel poses the question, when is it all right to remember, to undertake the healing process of “rememory”?  Morrison suggests that it’s safe to tap the hurt when there is a caring someone with whom to share the burden (“He wants to put his story next to hers”).  Living through the maiming, shackling, bottomless degradation of slavery requires strong survival skills and luck.  Mentally revisiting such experiences is harder and it requires communal support.  Teaching this challenging work at this particular time in history is actually serendipitous.  Engaging the difficult issues raised in the text forces us to take responsibility for human misbehavior.  In light of recent events, denial rings false.  I view this as a teachable moment.

Lest anyone thinks that I’m into doom and gloom, au contraire!  I believe that a powerful work of literature--however depressing its subject matter and overall presentation--is always uplifting and a joy to read.  Through its vivid imagery, eye-opening language, brave and wise examination of suffering, Beloved teaches us about the value of life, not death.   Helping students to understand and appreciate the value of such works of ethnic literature requires open, in-depth classroom discussions and other means of actively engaging the text.  If students leave our ethnic literature courses without any experience of positive transformation, we might have to approach our teaching from another angle.

The upcoming MELUS conference on multiethnic pedagogy provides an exceptional opportunity to debate such issues (or you all can tell me I’m “full of it”).  As our national and global society moves uncertainly forward, I believe that all MELUS folks have an important and timely role to play.  We are in the business of sharing stories, which, especially among ethnic American cultures, can be equivalent to saving lives.  Are we up to the challenge?

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States 16th Annual Conference, April 11-14, 2002
Host: University of Washington's Graduate School & Department of American Ethnic Studies
Conference Convener: Professor Stephen H. Sumida
Pedagogy, Praxis, and Politics: Multiethnic Literature in U.S. Education
Conference site in Seattle: Best Western University Tower, 4507 Brooklyn Ave NE
[for MELUS hotel reservations, call: (206) 634-2000 or (800) 899-0251]

This conference will feature panels, workshops, and roundtable sessions on all aspects of multiethnic literatures of the U.S., as well as practical and practice-based issues on topics like:  how to teach an introductory class in multiethnic literatures of the U.S.; how to teach a specific author, text, theme, ethnic group, etc.; how to introduce or increase the use of multiethnic literatures in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education; how graduate programs in literature and composition can prepare students for teaching in increasingly diverse classrooms; how to facilitate classroom discussions on sensitive issues such as "race" and ethnicity; how to have academic and civic communities work together to achieve common goals; and other issues related to ethnic literature and the literature classroom, such as: how multiethnic literature programs have developed and fared over the years; what happens when politics and aesthetics collide; how student discomfort with "race" affects course evaluations-and what to do about this; the appropriate use of terms for ethnic identities (e.g., "Latino/a" versus "Hispanic"); the use of ethnic vernacular speech patterns and diction; ethnic humor and racial/cultural stereotypes.

MELUS Cookbook

The MELUS Family Cookbook, 243 pages including index, will be available in December for $10 plus $4 domestic and $6 international shipping per copy. The collection consists of 147 recipes for main dishes, vegetables, salads, desserts, breads, and beverages ranging from Hamantaschen (cookies) and Zwiebelkuchen (onion tart) to Yassa au Poulet (chicken in lemon juice) and Aloo Baingan ka Shaak (stuffed eggplant and potatoes) to Ma Po Doufu (tofu) and Bibingka (coconut pudding-cake).  The cookbook also includes a short story about an Italian American family dinner, five poems, an anecdote about Nixon in China, and a disquisition on "Safe Treyf."  To order your copy, please send a check or money order to MELUS, P.O. Box 562, Las
Cruces, New Mexico  88004-0562, U.S.A. Please e-mail inquiries to <recipes@zianet.com>.

The MELUS cookbook will be out in December; anyone interested in buying one should e-mail Avis Payne at <recipes@zianet.com>.

Avis Kuwahara Payne
MELUS Treasurer
P.O. Box 562
Las Cruces, New Mexico  88004-0562
U.S.A.

Annoucing the newly designed MELUS Graduate Student Web Page, "Opportunities for MELUS Graduate Students," located at http://oz.uc.edu/~meachara/ .

The site has been designed to help facilitate the professionalization of MELUS graduate students.  To that end, special features of the site include up-to-date CFPs for journals and anthologies; CFPs for both graduate and general interest conferences, with notations of awards and incentives for graduate presenters; fellowship and other funding opportunities for students in multi-ethnic literatures; and news for MELUS Graduate Students. Updates will include low-cost housing and dining options for the Seattle conference (April 11-14, 2002), among other issues.  Your suggestions are welcome.

Rebecca Meacham, MELUS Graduate Student Representative and Coordinator
Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of Cincinnati
P.O. Box 210069
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069
E-mail: melusgradrep@hotmail.com

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the interrogation of gender through speculative means in art and culture (sf, magical realism, the non-real) (see web page http://www.csuohio.edu/femspec) announces 2.2, a special issue devoted to native american women's works. The issue has a southwestern flavor, with a focus on Leslie Silko, plus plains poetry by Sara Little-Crow Russel, and fiction by Dawn K. Pettigrew, Stephanie Sellers and Janet McAdams. Included also are critical analysis of Marijo Moore's poetry, a review of Paula Gunn Allen's Life is a Fatal Disease, an article about Solar Storms by Louise Erdrich as well as a review of her children's books.

The kick-off article explores technology, magic and resistance in native women's speculative works. The concept of "tribal rtealism" (as opposed to "magical realism") iis explored. The art show from Three Sisters in Santa Fe

New Mexico is represented by a few selections, and Native American teen artist Kit Ball's work, sold at pow-wows, is reproduced as well as discussion of the importance of recent works of Winona La Duke. This first special issue will be followed by a second native women's issue, to be edited by Candra Cruz, a Cherokee woman living in Cleveland who will work with a collective
of Native women on an issue by and for the native community. Contact the office (info available on web page) for more info or to submit works.--Batya Weinbaum, ed.


CALL FOR ESSAYS

Call for essays for Discrimination Revisited: Will the Phoenix Rise? Voices of Women in the Academy.

We* are interested in receiving essays by and about women educators, administrators, lawyers, mediators and staff concerning the academy from entry level to retirement, with specific suggestions transforming the institution. We are willing to consider fictionalized accounts and to publish under pseudonyms to protect identity of authors to whom the publication of such materials might be detrimental. We view issues such as race, gender, ethnicity, etc., as issues created and reproduced by patriarchy. Women of all races, colors, and ethnicities are situated outside this basically uniform class system of ranking.  We are viewed and situated as inherently inferior by virtue of our gender, and are treated as such in academia as in other institutions. Wanting to move beyond "victim feminism," we want to aim
towards including a "solutions" or "happy endings" or "best practices" section; furthermore, we suggest that each essay include a statement of what good came from the experience (even if it's just a bitter lesson learned); or what parts of it were handled well; or how it might have been handled much more fairly and efficaciously; or how similar situations have been handled much better in other venues--the best practices bit.

Some possible topics include:

1. Class ranking and salary discrimination at hiring.
2. Discrimination in gaining tenure or being denied tenure due to employees' non-conformity and/or refusal/inability to perpetuate "normative" naturalized
patriarchal values.
3. Why, in terms of the values of the patriarchal regime, only certain courses (that perpetuate the normalized and naturalized patriarchal canon) signify "high" class status; other "unnatural" and "abnormal" courses (such as multicultural, multi-ethnic, containing and focusing on "minority" and women writers) have "low" or no class status.
4. Class ranking discrimination against such faculty in terms of assigning them  "low" class status courses requiring more hours of work and assigning them few or no courses that carry "high" class status.
5. How some committee assignments signify "low" class ranking in terms of traditional normative and naturalized competitive guidelines that determine ranking for tenure, promotion
6.  Class ranking discrimination against such employees in terms of promotion.
7. How funding for conferences, travel, released time for research, etc. and withholding of mentoring and information relates
8. Motherhood-based discrimination: pregnancy discrimination, refusal to assign courses during hours that child care is available, problematizing the sometimes necessary presence of children in the workplace
9. Cultural oppression for lesbians
10. Memo wars: when to engage, how why and when to get out of them gracefully
11. "Life after"" What did women do who left discriminatory situations? When they left, who won?
12. Ambivalence and conflict: how to live with it or get over it
13. When to build support, and how; and when to lie low
14. Use of male-defined vs female defined tactics
15. Similarities in narratives of abuse and narratives of discrimination
16. Similarities in trauma and recovery lit and the experience of victims of discrimination
17. Experience in continued discrimination even in hopefully non patriarchal (eg women's studies or ethnic studies) situations
18. Analysis of the numerous books that have appeared on the situation of women in the academy--
19. Helpfulness of outside resources--how to utilize them
20. Strained relations with colleagues and students that result of keeping the "big secret"
21. Evaluation of counter-groups that are started on campuses and organizations to raise awareness--MIT study, AA, etc.
22. ADA assessment, in terms of usefulness for hidden disabilities, etc.
23. Relationship between untenured women faculty and women staff, deans, presidents, and other administrators, as well as women union officials.
24. Old/New Boy Culture: Love it or Learn It?
25. Emerging strains on relationships with colleagues when undergoing discrimination stress.
26. What next-where do we go from here?

Send draft of chapter or submission proposals to batyawein@aol.com by Nov. 20, 2001.

*Kathe Davis, Director of Women's Studies, Kent State University
  Batya Weinbaum, Ast. Pro. of English, Cleveland State University

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS

This is an urgent call for manuscripts for a collection of essays that address playwright August Wilson’s vision for a "ground together"--that is, a global arts community where forms of cultural expression produced by peoples across the globe are equally esteemed and celebrated. Inspired by the national dialogue on the state of black arts instigated by Wilson’s proactive and controversial speech, "The Ground On Which I Stand" (see American Theater, September 1996, pp. 14-17, 71-74), this interdisciplinary collection of original essays identifies as its core issues involving cultural property, cultural ownership and cultural affirmation in the 21st Century. This proposed collection of essays promises to earn a place alongside a growing body of cutting edge criticism on August Wilson in its interdisciplinary perspective on key issues inspired by the following touchstones from the playwright’s June 1996 address to the annual conference of the Theater Communications Group:

"There are some people who will say that black Americans do not have a culture—that cultures are reserved for other people, most notably Europeans of various ethnic groupings, and that black Americans make up a sub-group of American culture that is derived from the European origins of its majority population. But black Americans are Africans, and there are many histories and many cultures on the African continent."

"There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art: that is, art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society, and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America by designing its strategies for survival and prosperity."

"Our manners, our style, our approach to language, our gestures, and our bodies are not for rent. The history of our bodies—the maimings . . .the lashings . . .the lynchings . . . the body that is capable of inspiring profound rage and pungent cruelty—is not for rent."

"As playwrights grow and develop, as the theatre changes, the critic has an important responsibility to guide and encourage that growth. However, in the discharge of their duties, it may be necessary for them to also grow and develop."

"We need to develop guidelines for theprotection of our cultural property, our contributions and the influence they accrue. It is time we took the responsibility for our own talents in our own hands."

Essays whose premises are clearly informed by some aspect of Wilson’s arts related argument--no matter what position the author may advance--are especially welcome. Contributors are urged to consider "art" in broad terms including but not limited to disciplines such as visual and performing arts, journalism, religion, archaeology, arts education, technology, language, and literary criticism. The editor welcomes especially submissions that take bold positions on topics certainly not limited to the following avenues of investigation:

Issues of cultural property and cultural ownership/ the new Black Arts Movement/ overcoming the digital divide in black arts/ black arts and race matters/ making black art functional/ African American performance aesthetics/ the cutting edge in black arts criticism/ tensions between black arts and capitalist exploitation/ strategies for teaching black arts/ redefining black arts/ economics of black arts

Please be reminded that the above list is merely to establish some general parameters for essays. The editor welcomes brief inquiries for proposals as well as completed manuscripts of approximately twenty pages in MLA format should be sent to

Dr. Sandra G. Shannon
Professor, Department of English
Howard University
Washington, DC 20059
FAX: 202-806-6708
Phone: 202-806-6730, ext. 5443
Email: sshannon@fac.howard.edu

The deadline for completed manuscripts (hard copy and disk copy in Microsoft format) is Saturday, December 15, 2001.

CALL FOR PAPERS

TWO MELUS SESSIONS at American Literature Association Annual Conference

Dates: May 30-June2, 2002
Location: Hyatt Regency Long Beach, Long Beach California, 200 Pine Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90802

ALA Conference Director: Jeanne Reesman, University of Texas at San Antonio

Please send a 250-500 word paper proposal and a paragraph of  bio to be received (regular mail, email, or fax) by December 15, 2000.  Paper topics are purposely left open for MELUS members.  In broad terms, we are interested in fresh perspectives on one or more ethnic American works—including papers with a cross-cultural or interdisciplinary focus.  Whether critical, theoretical, or pedagogical, as long as the study reflects the mission of MELUS, we are willing to take a look.  There are only 6-8 possible presentation slots so give us your best.

Conference Fee (including two lunches):  $100  ($50 for Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Retired Faculty)

Deadline for Proposals: December 15, 2001

Address for Proposals
Professor Fred Gardaphe
European Languages, Literatures and Cultures
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-359
Fax:  (631) 632-9612; Email: Fgardaphe@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Information on the ALA and its activities can be found at: www.americanliterature.org

_Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies_ will be publishing a special issue devoted to contemporary Jewish American fiction writers.  It will focus on the more recent community of Jewish American novelists and short story writers, roughly, those coming after the Bellow-Roth-Ozick generation.  Such authors could include (but certainly not limited to) Steve Stern, Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenblum, Michael Chabon, Melvin Jules Bukiet, and Rebecca Goldstein.

This special issue of Shofar will be published in the Spring 2003 issue of the journal.

If you would like to submit a paper for consideration, please send it, along with a cover page, vital contact and professional information, and a SASE to:

Derek Parker Royal
Department of Languages and Communications
Prairie View A&M University
Prairie View, TX  77446
Derek_Royal@pvamu.edu

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2002

“The Russian Dreiser: A Narrative History of a Research Project”
Jeanna Engelman and Laura Hapke

In the early summer of 2001, a student and her Pace professor tackled Theodore Dreiser. For the professor, it was a nice continuation of her lifelong fascination with—and twenty-five years’ research on—a controversial American author of the early 1900s. (Selections from Dreiser’s most famous novel, Sister Carrie, follow this essay.) student, it was the kind of experience chronicled in this autobiographical narrative. This is the first of two parts and concerns her linkage of her Russian past and Dreiser’s role in it. In a kind of running ethnography of interest to many at Pace, Jeanna also considers Russians in America.

One of the pleasant surprises of my American education was seeing Dreiser’s name on my lit syllabus. Actually, it was Dreiser to whom I owe my A grade in Lit 211 as well as my theater-like experience in that class. The story preceding all this experience somewhat funny and instructive: never fall  victim to fellow student’s opinions about a teacher. I almost did. I am a strong believer in fate. What is meant to be will be. I was warned against taking a class with Professor. Hapke by several students, the reason being: ”She never gives an A, she is sooo difficult.” Armed with that advice, I frantically searched through the schedule of classes for Fall 2000, realizing with a cold sweat that Professor Hapke’s class was the only one that fits in to my schedule. O, great, I thought, only with my luck! An old world cliché “mother is always right” worked this time again. My mom convinced me that those fellow students were probably lazy to do any work, but “you, baby, can never do bad in literature, you’re a book worm, the professor will surely recognize that!” All right, I decided to give it a shot, but after the first lesson and another warning I made a decision to drop this class. That is when I saw Sister Carrie on the syllabus. The novel, about a naïve young girl who worships capitalism and climbs to success by manipulation, I knew to be a classic. Carrie’s rise is shadowed by the fall of her lover, Hurstwood, who sacrifices reputation and family to support her, only to be left when he cannot provide. As a tale of succeeding in and losing the American dream, it was a powerful book, I remembered.

2. So what?

  Sister Carrie’s name rang a pleasant bell and brought nostalgia for my Russian life, when I (all of us) read Dreiser hungrily, gaining knowledge about that other world, the world of hunger, desperation, crime, and wealth (at least that was what we were told). I heard a chorus of Russian voices when I interviewed my family and friends: Everyone in Russia knew Dreiser….” As I talk to my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother, today, they noted that they had no friends who would not know him and have read him. Almost every household had his books on the shelves. My grandaunt owned his complete works.  When searching for his books or books about him, I noted that New York City’s Russian bookstore or library clerks knew right away whom I was talking about, when the Americans asked for the spelling of the last name.
Sitting in that classroom I felt privileged to have shaken hands many times with Mr. Dreiser.

3. What we read in “The Old Country”

Of course it wasn’t only Dreiser.  Despite the sometimes negative reputation Russians have in the United States, they continue to be some of the most educated people in the world. Russians can rightfully carry the torch of very well-read. Russian readers are very greedy and spoilt. They have access to the world literature: European, South American, American, etc. Russians read a lot and are able to differentiate between a great and a not-so-great book. Because of the iron curtain the Russians were limited in a lot of things. Reading, though, had no such limits. They asked not only for a compelling plot, but also for beautiful language. The element of taste was extremely important to them too.

Russian literature made history partly because of its beauty of language. Any Russian novel or a short story will offer paragraphs of a purely descriptive nature. The book may go on and on about the beauty of a lake or a tree, drowning the willing reader in synonyms and metaphors. This ecstasy from the language makes the Russian literature similar to French. The baroque style of writing is what Russians are used to. They look too for the whimsical and the fanciful. Raised on the best examples of a world literature, most of which the average American has never heard of, Russians have  earned the right to choose and judge.
 I don’t want to brag about this selective reading, because the only selection available was the best one. We didn’t have Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. Soviet libraries were filled with only the best of the best. We read Dostoyevski, Tolstoi, Maupassant, and Hemingway for pleasure. Any self-respecting person was armed with knowledge of the greatest world literature. Children read the Grimm brothers, Andersen, Perrot, all  stripped today of their authorship by Disney.

4. Why we read Dreiser back then/there

At the time when Dreiser’s reputation was at low ebb among American literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Hapke reminded me, this was not the case in the Soviet Union in the years prior to the fall of communism. She remarked how Dreiser was bought, read, commented on in literary journals, scholarly prefaces, universities, high schools, and the homes of what passed for the middle and lower-middle classes. His collected works appeared in Russia, in splendid gold and burgundy (or lilac) covers; America has yet to issue them under one aegis.

So why Dreiser, the writer whom not even his own country considers great? The reasons for his popularity in former Soviet Union are numerous. Even though we thought that he was “no master of the pen,” especially compared to the great French and Russian authors, his language was new and unusual to the Russians. Dreiser offered the facts. Russians did not read Dreiser for aesthetic delight and pleasure, but to receive information.

Before the iron curtain was lifted Dreiser was in fact one of the very few sources the Soviet people had about the US. There were not too many American authors available, only those such as Mark Twain, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway. Dreiser offered the best insight into American reality and made the Russian reader happy to live in USSR. His books opened a window on American life. Dreiser's themes played right into Soviet propaganda about the capitalism, its amorality, importance of material success. They seemed almost made to order for the soviet regime, according to which the need to succeed in the capitalistic society often violates the 10 Cmmandments and pushes the person to step on others and even to kill. Soviets were ecstatic that the official America did not accept Dreiser as one of her “greatest sons: his books, so the argument went, exposed the rotting base of the imperialism and the hypocrisy of the rich.

As the important editor of the twelve-volume Dreiser, the most complete in publication in the Russian 1970s, the well-known critic Ivanko noted approvingly that the American writer had had his eyes opened by the October 1917 Revolution. According to Ivanko, “Dreiser's word reflected real problems of the developing American imperialism in the 19th and early 20 centuries, when US became the leading country where the gap between rich and poor was the deepest. In his books D. stripped imperialism, its hypocrisy, and its influence on humanity.”

Even as a Russian readership literature dutifully placed Dreiser’s texts in the ranks of agitprop literature, it found pleasure in the possibilities of self-transformation experienced by his young men and women. In the 1970s and 80s there was a disproportion between the city and the suburbs, the lack of good clothes, the need to possess beautiful things–all those themes were very topical for the Russians. Many of them tried to move into the big cities and build a new life. The cities have no souls, they lure with their lights and shimmers the person tries to dissolve in the big melting pot, instead he is lost, because he loses his own stem and root. There was no Russian literature at that time that would discuss this problem. This theme first was addressed in the 70s in the Oscar winning picture "Moscow does not believe in tears." But by then Dreiser had already written about it.

5. When did I first meet Him and Who Am I?

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact year, but I was approximately thirteen years old. At that time my mother and I left my father and moved to the city of my mom’s (and my) birth –into the warm outstretched arms of grandma who was ecstatic to see us freed from “that anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic, hard drinking genius-the artist and the musician--my dad.

The marriage of my parents was a great shock to both sides of the family. My mother is Jewish, a city girl whose parents were well known in her town. My grandmother was a special education teacher, a position of respect. My grandfather held an high administrative post in the forest department which was extremely important at those times when all the heating was accomplished by burning wood and coal. My grandparents had always prided themselves on being honest soviet workers. They lived modestly and worked towards rebuilding the country after the horrors the WWII. Grandma especially took action in all possible community projects. The business of her society was her business. She and her husband, despite the financial difficulties (even though they could be avoided had my grandfather behaved in a way most administrators behaved) were enthusiastic patriots. They were communists, if not card-carrying, but at heart.

It is not surprising, then, that grandmother's father knew the history of the Communist Party by heart. One could open any page and give him the first few words, and he continued it till the end. At the time when Jews were not very much in favor in Soviet Union, my ancestors were dedicated and initiative citizens whose living quarters displayed proudly the portrait of Stalin on the wall. The day of Stalin's death brought genuine tears to their eyes. They honestly did not imagine how the country would survive without the great Iosif Vissarionovich.

My father's family history took a different direction. He grew up in a small country in Ukraine, in the region that borders with Poland. My paternal grandmother was born in Detroit, and she herself is Polish. Grandpa was a priest and an orchestra conductor. They had five children who later became artists or musicians (and in the case of my father and uncle, both).  The family, like all the families in that region, was notorious for their anti-Soviet  views. One cannot imagine what caused such two different people to connect their lives together. The arguments on both sides of the family were strong. One was shocked when my father opened his mouth and expressed his view on everything soviet; the other had an issue with my mother's nationality and a gentle upbringing (she could not work the field!). By the way, the in-laws never met.  In Soviet Union the gap between the city and the country is tremendous. The people live completely different lives and hold different views.

My father, to return to the family narrative, is a very impressive figure. He is a talented artist whose paintings are sold all over the word. One of them is hanging in Yale University. His musical talents (he plays piano, organ, accordion, guitar) are applauded by anyone who has  ever heard him play. He collects antiques, and his walls are covered with paintings and icons (some of them he painted themselves). The icons have always been subjects of fear. We were afraid to open the door sometimes because some brainwashed soviet citizens could report it to the officials. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, even though my mother was not a Christian. However, my father argued, since she grew up in an atheistic family and had no religious beliefs, she had to adhere to his beliefs. And so she did.

Over the years my father’s view began to take their toll. My mother saw the reason behind his arguments. As she visited her family in another city, they would close all the doors and windows in fear that the neighbors would hear my mother criticize the government, although she never did it in front of me). My father's fearless speeches did not go unnoticed - the KGB was interested. They visited him several times, but nothing could be proved.  Growing up and going to the Soviet school I was very much confused. Soviet propaganda on one had, and my dad’s anti-Soviet one on the other.

As I dutiful soviet pioneer, however, I held strongly to my beliefs about the greatness of the Soviet Union. Soviet propaganda was everywhere -in the books we read, in the activities we had, etc. We were so shocked by the stories of the capitalistic society, that we blessed the fate every day for living in the USSR. We considered ourselves privileged to be Soviets. The literature that we read only strengthened our sense of privileges. Uncle Tom's Cabin, later Martin Eden, and, of course, Dreiser, made us weep for  Americans who  were unfortunate enough to be Americans. The only thing we liked about West was their clothes—unofficially, of course!

But most of all we were dumbfounded to see other fellow Soviets leaving for America. These "poor deadened ones" became castaways from the society. They lost their jobs long before leaving the country, their children victims of ridicule, and so forth. When my future in-laws made this decision in the early seventies, my uncle on maternal side begged them to leave the children to us, trying to persuade them that they would soon end up in a Jewish cemetery.

6. The new truth

As Gorbachev came to power, everything changed. Black became white, and vice versa. My poor grandmother and those like her lived in hell. The beliefs that held them together all their lives, their goals---all a mirage. I remember clearly that in the first grade and was told by a teacher : " When you are in 10th grade, we will have communism." Communism society is a utopian, ideal society with no crime, no money, no police, and so forth.

As I lived in such official hopes, all of a sudden it was declared that not only we cannot build communism, we don't even have successful socialism. All the corruption, all the ridiculous ideas that we held on to like a drowning man to a straw, were exposed. At that point my paternal grandmother exclaimed, "How did Oleg (my father) know?" All the history books were abolished in schools and poor teachers had to teach us the "new truth". We, the young generation, had fun. The older people, however, did not. Their lives and work for the good of society were treated as lies. Their principles were ridiculed. It became "in style" to visit church and many people threw themselves into the midst of religious services, striving for something to believe in. All the literature we had ever read was looked upon with new eyes.

But Dreiser, together with London, Hemingway, being the most popular American writer, still held the torch of the popularity. If before he was prized for exposing the dirt of the capitalistic America, now he was noted on his prophet-like comments about Soviet Russia. His own travel account, Dreiser Looks at Russia ,which appeared in the US in 1928,was finally published after 60 years of being banned. And here is what was said about it and him:
 

A. Nikoluikin, "Dreiser even today is looking at Russia." ( From The Questions of Literature, Nov. 1989, Moscow.) (translation by Jeanna Engelman)

"D. Looks at Russia"(1928) is the name of the book that was hidden from the soviet reader for 60 years. D. was invited to celebrate 10th anniversary of the October Revolution in the fall of 1927 and came to USSR as one of the Amer. delegates. It is doubtfully necessary to explain why this most interesting for us book found itself to be forbidden. Such things happened not only with Dreiser. This sort of fate found almost everyone of the foreign writers that would undertake the theme of the Soviet. Union: R. Rolland's Moscow Diary, Steinbeck's Russian Diary, or Hemingway's For whom the bell tolls. D. was the first one to note that building of socialism in Russia takes hideous forms. This book is a historical document. We cannot doubt its truthfulness and benevolence. Its written by a friend who had an opportunity to say the truth about a country and what was beginning to be a Stalin's society. D. came to our country when the name of Stalin was not yet associated with whatever was going on in the USSR. That is why perversions in the building of socialism he refereed not to Stalin but to the ruling party.  In this is a certain historical originality of the book. It was written in the pre-cult period.

But he noticed weaknesses and violations that are memorable to us even today. When Dreiser came to Russia the question of who will beat whom in Lenin's circle was decided and Trotsky was deported. Battle for power continued, but it was not only a battle, but affirmation of Stalin's sovereignty. This was not  clear to everyone including D. Nevertheless, the book realistically reflected historical phase of the formation of the Stalin's period, moral suppressions of the personality, forcing of the fear, spying, court processes of the 30s.

Dreiser describes one of such incidents in detail. The book proves that the system of trampling of the rights and democratic basis of the state and society was already blossoming in 1927. D. saw the signs of "barracks socialism" that was erected first by Trotsky than by Stalin. D. noted that destruction of the union of peasants and workers will mean the destruction of the class of workers as such. Socialism was only in the beginning of its journey, but D. already understood that. He noted the lack of democracy as well, the democracy to which he was used in the USA and which he thought a necessary part of the humanity in order to built socialism as most humane order. At every step he encountered violations of what we call today "glasnost", which could not fail to  astonish and then anger him. As a person used to commercial advertisement, D. was surprised by a gust of propaganda that fell on him in Russia. Speaking of the cultural life in the country, D. noted that interference of the propaganda and censorship arrests the theater, cinema, breaking away all the best in the world literature if it doesn't conform to the norms of "proletarian art." In literature and art, as it is in politics, what rules is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but dictatorship of the communist party (the whole party then had no more than a million members.)

There were times in Soviet Union when it was written that D. did not understand the meaning of the ongoing building of socialism. Now it is necessary to admit (in this is the superiority of the descendants over the contemporaries) that D. was right in many aspects. He saw the cancer tumor that began to grow on the young body of the Soviet Union. His eye was sharp, but his voice, as the voice of others, was not heard. It is a known fact that after his trip to USSR D. attempted to join Amer. communist party- a fact that speaks for itself. But the elite of the party did not want to see in its lines the writer that did not cross to the proletarian platform. Really, D. was not a fan of the proletarian art.  During his trip to USSR D. made a choice for life: in his book about Soviet Union he states that he believes in the future and in the end joins communist party. As one can see, Dreiser’s popularity took a new course. But then Russians had always had the talent to adjust in any circumstances.

7. How Dreiser is linked to modern Russian readers?

Unfortunately, I don’t really know. But as a result of this project and my reflections on it, what I do know that modern Russians do not read Dreiser as much as Russian in the 70s and 80s. More Americans books are available today. Another reason for the fall of his popularity is that there are so many other sources of information. The issues that Dreiser dramatized in his works are not that pressing today for modern Russians.

8. What America thinks of Russians

If before "Perestroika" the prospective immigrants were despised and ridiculed, in the late 80s and the early 90s these people suddenly were envied. Everyone tried to find a Jewish grandmother in order to leave. Before it was thought that most hard-working Americans are starving; later (and it continues until present) poor Soviet citizens believed that money in American is growing on trees. This view, I think, is universal. The letters people received from USA never exposed the whole truth about an American life. Most of the news were great, which was further proved by colorful photographs of the tables breaking under the food and numerous presents (later were found out that those presents mostly come from Payless shoes and Telco stores.)
Upon arriving in the USA my enthusiastic countrymen were bitterly disappointed. It was not as easy to find a job as they thought it would be. The language barrier was a problem. A lot of immigrants fell into the depths of depression, especially men. By the greatest irony was the fact that in Russia they were hated for being Jewish and in American for being Russians! Americans perhaps are wary of immigrants, even though the only difference between them and us is the fact that their grandmothers came here a hundred years earlier. For some reason Russians are especially not in favor. I don't know why. Maybe because of their constant fear of being lied to, ripped of, ridiculed. In that sense some of my countrymen, especially the older generation, is paranoid. One cannot wonder why, since "The Truth" was being changed on several occasions during their life spans. Russians tend to be assertive in the extreme---again for the same reason. But overall, almost all of the Russian immigrants are people highly educated, people who held important posts in the Soviet Union. This is due to the fact that the only way for the Jews to make a living was to become good specialists in the Soviet Union. And they did. Many Americans have very wrong picture of the Russians. I get a feeling of deja vu upon hearing: "She is Russian, but she is great!" I heard the same in the "old country", only the word Russian was substituted was the word Jewish. The last statement did not apply to me, though, since I had a strong shield--my passport with my father's nationality in it.

 I currently take an Interpersonal Communication course in which intercultural communication is discussed as well. Our professor told a "funny" story of a student harassing her for not giving him the grade he desired. When asked by one of my classmates what nationality the student was, the professor looked guiltily into my eyes and the eyes of another Russian student, and replied "He is Russian, and for some reason all Russian men have a problem with a woman in Authority." To which I replied that it is not true, since in Russia most teachers are women and teachers in Russia are gods. Also, Russian women are very strong and independent. Most of them have jobs and not afraid of being left alone with children. They are survivors. So my dear professor who holds a Ph.D. in Communication was wrong as well. I did not mention to her that she shouldn't have revealed the nationality of the student, since it was irrelevant. Such people exist in every culture. But Americans love to stereotype.

End of Part One

********

Professor Hapke notes: I too learned from the early stages of our project in progress. Here are some of my own conclusions, based on reading Jeanna’s essay and being a Dreiser scholar for two decades:

Dreiser’s ability to integrate a leftist critique of economic divisions and the brutality of materialism remains unsurpassed  because he so well understood the lures of the entrepreneurial country America had so successfully become. His leftist dialogue was at its core a self-scrutiny of a relentless nature, far more radical novelistically than any of the class-rising-up solutions of the proletarian novel. Dreiser’s greatest achievement was to offer or move toward political answers that Americans of conscience could more readily access. He understood that the metaphor of money, so far from an evil and corrupt one, was the quintessential way of understanding what and how Americans paid for their lives. He illustrated that nothing less than a revolution in sensibility could inspire Americans to “go left” in any meaningful way. The American bourgeoisie, status-obsessed, ever insecure, and in a frenzied reconciliation of desire and middle-class tranquility, must be the repository of change, for it was their numbers that United States proletarians historically wished to swell. Until that revolution, the workers’ revolt would have to wait.

Works Cited
Ivanko ,S. Preface to the Complete Soviet Edition of Theodore Dreiser. Moscow, 1973.
Nikolukin, A. "Dreiser even today is looking at Russia." The
Questions of Literature, November 1989, Moscow.

Excerpts  from Sister Carrie:
This is the introduction to the novel, in which the ingenue character is presented with great detail and finesse.

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, which was checked in the baggage car, a cheap imitation alligator skin satchel holding some minor details of the toilet, a small lunch in a paper box and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a  pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so tightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

II. This is the description of the broken character Hurstwood in a Bowery room. He had left wife and prosperity for Carrie, failed in business, and been left by him in her upward climb to success,

Now he began to leisurely take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old, wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down.

It seemed as if he thought awhile for now he arose and turned the gas outl, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applying no match…When the odor reached his nostrils he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed. “What’s the use?” he said wearily….

MELUS EVENTS AT MLA 2001 CONVENTION IN NEW ORLEANS

Going to MLA?  There are three events sponsored by MELUS this year.

Thursday, 27 December
112.  The Book Cooks! Multiethnic Recipes for American Literature
8:45-10:00 p.m., Waterbury Ballroom, Sheraton

Program arranged by MELUS: The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.  Presiding: Fred Gardaphe, State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook

1. “Food and Artistic Performance in Portuguese American Writing,” Reinaldo Francisco Silva, Univ. de Aveiro
2. “Seaweed Marshmallows, Blitzkucken, and Pierogies: The Role of Food in Louise Erdrich’s Ojibwa World,” Annette J. Van Dyke, Univ. of Illinois, Springfield
3. “The East in the Midwest; or, Oriental Food Services in the Belly of America,” Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State Univ.
4. “Food Slut as Short-Order Cook (We Have No Bananas, No Bananas Today): Carmelita Tropicana’s ‘Food for Thought,’” Marìa DeGuzmán, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
 

Friday, 28 December
340. Cash Bar Arranged by MELUS: The
Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature
of the United States.

5:15 to 6:30 p.m. Bayside C, Sheraton

Saturday, 29 December
415. Celebrating the Life of MELUS Founder
Katherine Newman: A Roundtable Discussion

8:30 - 9:45 a.m.  Pontchartrain Ballroom C, Sheraton

A special session; session leader: Sally Ann Ferguson, North Carolina State Univerisity, Greensboro

Speakers: John M. Reilly, Howard Univ; Joseph T. Skerrett, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Jean Fagan Yellin, Pace Univ., NY

MELUS SPONSORED PANELS AT MLA - ABSTRACTS

"The Book Cooks! Multiethnic Recipes for American Literature"
MLA 2001, New Orleans

Annette Van Dyke
University of Illinois at Springfield
ABSTRACT:  Seaweed Marshmallows, Blitzkucken and Pierogies:  The Role of
Food In Louise Erdrich's Ojibwa World

References to food in the work of Louise Erdrich are often connected to obsession.  For instance, in _The Antelope Wife_, her characters are tested by encounters with spiritual representations of insatiable appetites:  the Windigo, the cannibalistic ice monster, and the deer people who represent lust and sexual obsession.  Food is a lure by which the deer people promise to satisfy "human hunger for the unattainable" (Erdrich, _Blue Jay's Dance_201-2).  The Antelope Woman herself appears to Rozina Whiteheart Beads and lures her into sexual obsession with Frank Shawano by brandishing "a fragrant, tawny, puffed-up ball of dough" (_Antelope Wife_ 36).  Frank, referred to as a Deer Man, catches Rozina by feeding her "bits of a cinnamon roll from his bare fingers" (37).  The blitzkucken<the cake recipe the duplication of which is a life-long effort of Frank's--is a "primal recipe" for "wrathful appetites" (_Blue Jay's Dance_ 202).  It is only when the proper ingredient of fear is added to the cake that it duplicates the effects of the original recipe and Erdrich's characters are momentarily released from their longings.

Reinaldo Silva, Universidade de Aveiro
ABSTRACT:  The Tastes from Portugal: Food and Artistic Performance in
Portuguese-American Writing

This paper explores the role of Portuguese food as an incentive for Portuguese-American writing in the works of three major ethnic writers: Katherine Vaz, Frank Gaspar, and Thomas Braga. While Vaz has expressed in Saudade and Mariana a fondness for Portuguese pastries and desserts (rice puddings, abbots' ears, nuns' bellies, tongues-of-mother-in-law, bacon from heaven, etc.), recipes originally made by nuns in eighteenth-century Catholic convents in Portugal,  Frank Gaspar recalls the steaming kale soup and clam dishes from his childhood days in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Thomas Braga, on the other hand, focuses on the role of codfish and codfish cakes during Lent as well as wine and the aromatic fennel utilized in Azorean dishes and liqueurs.

With Portuguese food and family dinners as a cultural ritual connecting these three writers, Vaz, Gaspar, and Braga see in these ethnic tastes endless recollections of the ancestral culture which they wish to keep alive within mainstream American culture. The smells and tastes from a mother's or grandmother's kitchen has left a lingering imprint on their palates and the process of writing about these experiences, in a way, represents for them a sort of umbilical cord, a bridge connecting them to their ancestral Portuguese culture.

As native American writers, Vaz, Gaspar, and Braga find in Portuguese food - especially the recipes and tastes their immigrant ancestors brought with them to America - a medium for artistic performance and a way to assert their ethnic background.

Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State University
ABSTRACT:  The East in the Midwest: Oriental Food Services in the Belly of
America

This paper takes its cue from both the biblical Jonah and the Monkey in the sixteenth-century Chinese classic, Journey to the West. Swallowed by the whale, Jonah mends his ways and carries out the Lord's wishes.  Monkey, by contrast, plays with the demon, ready to cannibalize from inside out the one who cannibalized him.  Compared to Jonah's conversion, Monkey's subversiveness from within serves as a role model for "Orientals" trapped in the Oriental food services in the Midwest. Based on such a premise, I conduct a semiotic mini-reading of the Oriental restaurants and grocery stores along Grand River Avenue, the main drag of the adjacent cities of Lansing, East Lansing, and Okemos in the state of Michigan, the digestive tract processing Oriental food and culinary symbols in the body of the West. All of the fifty odd Asian restaurants in this area feature prominently "Orientalness," not only with the products they carry but with the way they present themselves. This paper proceeds to analyze specific examples of billboards, flyers, and TV commercials of Oriental food services.

Western consumption of Chinese food in the Midwest follows the pattern of exotic clichés-alien and yet familiar, seemingly new and yet entirely predictable.  Such contradictory elements characterize Oriental food services. Freud's dualistic interpretation of the uncanny--both familiar and strange--marks Oriental food services so precisely that the symbiotic pair arises even before one reaches an Oriental restaurant.  A visit to the Chinese restaurant, for example, begins with the usual car ride through familiar cityscape to an establishment with exotic store front, if not tilted pagoda-style roof, then surely Chinese ideograms on the signs. The exact meaning of those Chinese words on the sign or on the menu is far less important than the aura of exoticism they lend to the outing to Oriental-ness. By the same token, the cultural significance of interior designs such as classical paintings, lanterns, and dragons may elude customers.  The strangeness is absorbed and domesticated within the
familiar; the foreign is consumed, literally gorged, by the self.

María DeGuzmán, UNC-Chapel Hill
ABSTRACT:  Food Slut As Short Order Cook (We Have No Bananas, No Bananas Today):  Carmelita Tropicana's "Food for Thought"

"I'm like a short-order cook when I make performance art pieces"--Alina Troyano, "Cooking Performance Art"
"Yes, we have no bananas/We have no bananas today"--The Tropicanettes in Memorias de la Revolución

A dress garnished with fake fruit, an extended metaphor involving milk of amnesia, a super-abundance of references to Carmen Miranda's famous line "Bananas are my business"-these are the foodstuffs that the 1.5 generation queer feminist Cuban-American sisters and collaborating performance/filmmaker artists Alina and Ela Troyano trade in to construct their cultural critique of assimilation a la "American," that is, assimilation as Anglo-Americanizing homogenization. Alina (aka Carmelita Tropicana) and Ela, who have been working in New York City since the 1980s within various avant-garde and theater movements and venues, cook up performance pieces such as "Memorias de la Revolucion," Milk of Amnesia," and "Food for Thought." One of the main ingredients of these performances, scripts and essays, is a multitude of references to food, both as shorthand for the historical commodification of the Caribbean, more particularly Cuba, into foodstuffs and as sticky mango slices of resistance against melting-pot ingestion into and by Anglo-U.S. culture.

Resistance to ingestion by Anglo-U.S. culture is linked to food precisely, I contend, to intervene in assimilation and the massive cultural expectation that what is required  from Cubans and other Latinas/os [despite the fact that many Cubans do not consider themselves Latinos] is to "assimilate"--either in the form of blending into an Anglicized "white" U.S. hitherto dominant culture  (that homogenized white milk of amnesia) or contenting themselves with being, at best, reduced to exotic comestibles, the banana republic model of the Pax Americana figured most famously by singer and dancer Carmen Miranda.  Alina Troyano's invented persona Carmelita Tropicana with her dress of fruits is designed to reappropriate the previous Carmen (and perhaps all Carmens before, including the Spanish one who sells oranges in the nineteenth century?). If one may play on the word "carmen," Carmelita Tropicana sings and speaks out between cultures, refusing to assimilate or be assimilated, to eat or be eaten according to Anglo-U.S. rules and expectations.

Integral to performing between cultures and carving out alternative spaces is performative (and one hopes literal) wresting of food away from a typically or homogeneously U.S. "American" diet. Rather than leaving intact the cultural dominance of meat,  milk, and sugar (the latter in the form of Oreo cookies,  frosted cupcakes,  and Twinkies),  the Troyano sisters' scripts Cubanize or tropicalize the very matter that composes these comestibles. Hence, meat becomes lechon or roasted pig. Homogenized grade-A milk is mixed with the sweet condensed milk of Cuba and all sweets serve as reminders of Caribbean sugarcane. My presentation focuses on the intercultural, multicultural, but really ultimately transcultural mischief carried out in the language of food in Carmelita Tropicana's script/performative essay "Food for Thought." Through a detailed analysis of this essay, I explore the very question that Alina Troyano as Carmelita Tropicana asks, "Why had I [read she] combined these two cuisines? Was this a precursor to the multiculti revolution?" (188). I suggest that her piece invokes food-lemons, potatoes, tomatoes, mole sauce, chocolate and chicken, arroz con pollo-to  construct a composite cultural, historical, and psychological "angle" in a humorous mock simulation of the typical anthropological approach to the function of food in particular human societies. But this simulation is quite deliberately focused on a plurality of cultures as they meet and combine and recombine in the Americas. One might say the essay implicitly targets the U.S. phrase "ethnic food," shows all food (including that "all-American food") to be ethnic, and thus gives the lie to homogeneity, underscoring its utter cultural "unnaturalness." At the same time, Tropicana naturalizes culinary and cultural pastiche, the work of a short order cook who cooks sabroso things up in a hurry using whatever is at hand and who also takes away with one hand the "Cuban" banana she offers with the other because-guess what?--the banana is not Cuban or Caribbean after all, but native to Asia, a transplanted, transcultural comestible that reminds us we are all composed of elsewheres. Hence, why insist on uniformity of identity?

The major paradox of this refusal to abide by traditional U.S. homogenizing rules of assimilation is that it requires a colossal act of assimilation in itself. Carmelita Tropicana's text with its references to numerous cuisines, combinations of cuisines, and other texts about food such as Pablo Neruda's poems "Ode to the Lemon" or "Ode to the Artichoke" suggests a continuous act of ingestion-an orality with sexual dimensions or rather in which textuality is playfully equaled with sexuality  and  sexuality with, if one may be permitted the neologism, "culturality."  For instance, two paragraphs into "Food for Thought" Carmelita exclaims, "Two months ago my girlfriend insulted me. She called me a food slut. A food slut! I had to think. I was thinking and thinking so much I had become an intellectual. Was it true?" (187). Later on, Carmelita declares, "[t]he insult led me to examine my relationship to food" (187). The resultant essay brings its readers to the realization that the insult is, in the end, proudly claimed. If she is a food slut, she is unapologetically a food slut especially to the extent that through this talk of food she recodes assimilation away from homogeneity and toward plurality. "Food for Thought" demonstrates  not that we should be multicultural, but that culture is already by definition multi, poly, heterogeneous and can only be rendered in terms of a mixed-up mix-it-up recipe-a pinch of this, a pinch of that, mix, shake, bake. Thus when the short order cook says, "Yes, we have no bananas" she is proposing a conceptual-"food for thought"-model of culture, and particularly culture in the Americas, the United States included, in which assimilation in the old or typically understood sense of the word makes no sense. No one in the "banana republics" can really be said to "have" bananas if bananas are actually native to Asia and no one ought to be a banana-yellow on the outside, white on the inside when in fact white is not as white as one might have thought  and those with phobias of "foreign food" are like "fried fish ...one eye open but ... cannot see" themselves.

NEW BOOKS

Forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press: Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox, by A. Yemisi Jimoh. (Spring 2002;ISBN 1-57233-172-0;$30)

In this book, A. Yemisi Jimoh demonstrates the critical influence of music on the fiction of various twentieth-century African American writers. Exploring novels and short stories by Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and others, Jimoh shows how black musical traditions--specifically Spirituals, Blues, and Jazz--are
used to shape characterizations and thematic content and to evince ideas, emotions, and experiences.

The author's analysis situates the literary texts she discusses within the diverse social energies of their times and locates important intersections where music, history, politics, and literature meet. Jimoh carefully distinguishes among the different musical forms and shows how, in fiction, they are transformed into rich metaphors. She explains, for example, how characters and themes drawing on the Spiritual-Gospel tradition de-emphasize human agency, depicting earthly survival as a transitory state and heavenly triumph as a victory. By contrast, in Blues fiction, characters must often negotiate an environment of alienation, change, and uncertainty in order to achieve a more earthly triumph, even if that triumph is only survival. Jazz fiction, meanwhile, goes beyond Blues and Spiritual expressions to explore new realms, revealing a space for infinite options, radical change, resistance, and revolution.

This innovative book examines novels that have not previously received extensive attention, including Albert Murray's _Train Whistle Guitar,_ Wallace Thurman's _The Blacker the Berry,_ and Ann Petry's _The Street._ At the same time, it brings fresh and intriguing readings to such widely studied works as Ellison's _Invisible Man_ and Morrison's _Sula._ Finally, it suggests some exciting directions for future study as new generations of African American musicians and writers continue to develop
and expand on established traditions and forms.

The Author: A. Yemisi Jimoh is an associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her articles have appeared in the *African American Review,* *MELUS,* and other publications.

A. Yemisi Jimoh
Department of English
University of Arkansas
333 Kimpel Hall
Fayetteville, AR 72702
501-575-7210; 501-575-5919 fax

A. Yemisi Jimoh
Department of English
University of Arkansas
333 Kimpel Hall
Fayetteville, AR 72702
501-575-7210; 501-575-5919 fax

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENTS

U of Rhode Island
English, 112 Independence Hall, Kingston, RI 02881
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng
Assistant Professor of English

The Department of English at the University of Rhode Island anticipates an opening for a position in the following area dependent upon approval of funding. Ph.D. is required and must be awarded by August 2002. Ph.D. must be in the following area of specialization: Critical or cultural theorist in African-American literature and culture. Evidence of teaching excellence, scholarship, and publication required. Must be able to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in areas of specialization.
Experience working with culturally diverse population desirable. This is an Assistant Professor, tenure-track position that would begin in September 2002.

Application deadline is November 20, 2001. Submit a letter of application, vita, three current letters of professional recommendation, one course syllabus, a sample of recent scholarly writing, and copies of transcripts to:

Dorothy F. Donnelly, Search Committee Chair,
(Log #021430),
UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND,
Box G, Kingston, RI 02881

The University of Rhode Island is an AA/EEO employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty, staff, and students. Women, ethnic minorities, and individuals from under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.

Valerie Karno
Assistant Professor of English
University of Rhode Island
karno@uri.edu
401.874.4682

For MELUS NEWSNOTES:

THREE JOB VACANCIES; ASSISTANT PROFESSOR LEVEL
California State University, Fresno
English, Fresno, CA  93740-8001

1)  Tenure-track position in 19th-Century British Romantic Literature to begin Fall 2002.  Ph.D. in English with specialization in British Romanticism (A.B.D. considered for temporary lectureship with possible future conversion to tenure track.  Duties include teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the Romantic period--including historical, political, and literary contexts--as well as composition and introductory literature courses as part of a 12 semester-unit (3 course) teaching load.

2)  Tenure track position in Composition Studies to begin Fall 2002.  Ph.D. in Rhetoric/Composition Theory and evidence of strong teaching required. A.B.D. considered for temporary lectureship with possible future conversion to tenure track.  Duties include teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in composition studies, literature, and program administration after the first year as part of a 12 semester-unit (3 courses) teaching load.

3)  Tenure track position in World Literature to begin Fall 2002.  Ph.D. in English or Comparative Literature, specialization in non-Western literature and evidence of strong teaching required.  A.B.D. considered for temporary lectureship with possible future conversion to tenure track.  Duties include teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in (in translation) World Masterpieces, World literature surveys (Ancient, Medieval-Renaissance, or Modern), World literature topic courses, and post-colonial theories as well as composition courses as part of a 12 semester-unit (3 courses) teaching load.

Strong preference will be given to candidates who are able to relate to an ethnically diverse student population.  Salary:  competitive, unionized. Send letter, CV, 15-30 page writing sample, dossier, and stamped postcard to:

Ruth Jenkins, Hiring Committee Chair,
English Department MS PB 98,
California State University, Fresno, 5245

North Backer Avenue, Fresno,
CA  93740-8001.  Interviews at MLA.

To ensure full consideration, all materials must be received by November 19, 2001.  CSU, Fresno, is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Available Position for Creative Writing--Poetry

Tenure-track assistant professor in Creative Writing (Poetry), full-time appointment beginning August 2002.  MFA or PhD required by time of appointment. Candidates should possess a strong commitment to undergraduate education and
service, demonstrate evidence of scholarly activity, and have published poetry (preferably a book). Twelve-hour course load each semester could include creative writing, general education courses (writing and literature), and courses in the major.  Desirable related expertise may include a secondary creative writing specialty, literary theory, American literature, or world
literature.  Selected candidates will submit a writing sample, and first-round interviews will be held at MLA. On-campus interviews will include a demonstration of teaching effectiveness and a brief poetry reading.  Highly competitive salary and benefits package.

For more information about Shippensburg University, see http://www.ship.edu

Please send a letter of application, current c.v., and three recent letters of
recommendation to:

Kim Long, Chair
Creative Writing Search Committee
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
1871 Old Main Drive, DHC 113
Shippensburg PA 17257

Applications must be postmarked no later than November 2, 2001.

E-mail inquiries (but not applications): kmlong@ship.edu

Shippensburg University is committed to equal employment opportunity.  Women, persons of color, veterans, and the disabled are encouraged to apply.

The English Department of Messiah Colleague is accepting applications for a full time faculty appointment, begining Fall Semester 2002, as Assistant Professor of English (English, Poetry Writing) at Messiah College. MFA is required, PhD is preferred. Successful candidates will teach poetry writing and other courses in creative writing. Candidates who can offer additional
courses in Contemporary Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, or English Education are encouraged to apply. Please submit vita and three letters of reference to: Dr. Peter Powers, Chair of the English Department, Messiah College, Grantham, PA  17027 or e-mail: Ppowers@messiah.edu

Messiah College is a Christian college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. For more information about Messiah College:  www.messiah.edu Review of applications will begin November 15, 2001. EOE.

The University of Connecticut
Department of English
215 Glenbrook Road Unit 4025
Storrs, CT  06269-4025

The Department of English seeks a practicing poet, fiction, or creative nonfiction writer to serve as Director of the Creative Writing Program beginning Fall 2002.  This is a tenure-track assistant professor position.  Responsibilities include a 2/1 teaching load of introductory and advanced creative writing courses and administration of the Creative Writing Program.

Our Program annually serves about 300 students in undergraduate creative writing courses and 15 students in graduate creative writing courses.  In addition we sponsor 10-15 visiting writers per year; a monthly student reading series and open mic event; a Creative Writing Club; a Graduate Student Creative Writing Alliance; a student-produced literary magazine, the Long River
Review; and a poetry mass transportation project, Poetic Journeys.  MFA or PhD,  publications, administrative and teaching experience required.

Applicants should send letter, CV, and dossier to Search CW at above address by January 31,  2002.  In keeping with our commitment to build a culturally diverse community, the University of Connecticut invites applications from women, people with disabilities, and members of minority groups.

The University of Connecticut
Department of English
215 Glenbrook Road Unit 4025
Storrs, CT 06269-4025

Assistant Professor, Rhetoric and Composition

Tenure-track appointment beginning Fall 2002.  Specialization in the history of rhetoric and an interest in teaching writing theory/pedagogy in the graduate program; secondary interest in teaching undergraduate literature courses in an area of English or American or World Literature in English; participation in the administration of the Freshman English Program.  Normal teaching load is two courses per semester.  Send letter, CV and dossier to Search RC at above address by November 15, 2001.  In keeping with our commitment to build a culturally diverse community, the University of Connecticut invites applications from women, people with disabilities, and members of minority groups.